Abstract
Accumulating evidence supports the presence of a general psychopathology dimension, the p factor (‘p’). Despite growing interest in the p factor, questions remain about how p is assessed. Although multi-informant assessment of psychopathology is commonplace in clinical research and practice with children and adolescents, almost no research has taken a multi-informant approach to studying youth p or has examined the degree of concordance between parent and youth reports. Further, estimating p requires assessment of a large number of symptoms, resulting in high reporter burden that may not be feasible in many clinical and research settings. In the present study, we used bifactor multidimensional item response theory models to estimate parent- and adolescent-reported p in a large community sample of youth (11–17 years) and parents (N = 5,060 dyads). We examined agreement between parent and youth p scores and associations with assessor-rated youth global functioning. We also applied computerized adaptive testing (CAT) simulations to parent and youth reports to determine whether adaptive testing substantially alters agreement on p or associations with youth global functioning. Parent-youth agreement on p was moderate (r =.44) and both reports were negatively associated with youth global functioning. Notably, 7 out of 10 of the highest loading items were common across reporters. CAT reduced the average number of items administered by 57%. Agreement between CAT-derived p scores was similar to the full form (r =.40) and CAT scores were negatively correlated with youth functioning. These novel results highlight the promise and potential clinical utility of a multi-informant p factor approach.
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Information is defined in the Analytic Approach section.
The term “quality” when referring to items should be interpreted with caution, because “quality” depends on the purpose of the item. For example, here we assume the GOASSESS was designed to get optimal measurement in a community sample, making extremely difficult (severe) items less informative than items with average severity. However, if the goal of the test were to distinguish among people at very high levels of the trait (e.g., to make a decision about whether an individual is a suicide risk), then items of average severity are “worth” far less.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the participants of this study and all the members of the Recruitment, Assessment, and Data Teams whose individual contributions collectively made this work possible. This research was supported by the NIH (RC2 MH089983, MH117014, MH119219, MH117014 and MH089924; K08MH079364; K23MH120437; NIDA supplement to MH089983), the Dowshen Program for Neuroscience, and the Lifespan Brain Institute (LiBI) of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
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Ran Barzilay serves on the scientific Advisory Board and holds equity in ‘Taliaz Health’, with no relevance to the current work.
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Jones, J.D., Boyd, R., Sandro, A. et al. The General Psychopathology ‘p’ Factor in Adolescence: Multi-Informant Assessment and Computerized Adaptive Testing. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01223-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01223-8